Linguistic distortion created by racism

Race Reflections AT WORK

In today's episode Guilaine reflects on how the perception of language and linguistics can become dislocated through a primitive colonial imaginary to the point where people do not hear language as it is.

She presents a hypothesis around the ways that the literal sound of racialised people talking can become distorted and dislocated in the ears of white people listening. She draws on two anecdotes as examples, both consisting of French speakers being heard as speaking non-French languages, one in an online video from a few years ago of two Black French people, and one a personal story of racial violence that she and her mother experienced. In addition she considers some passages by Frantz Fanon in his book Black Skin, White Masks: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/313127/black-skin-white-masks-by-fanon-frantz/9780241396667

She asks what happens to the white psyche when exposed to stimuli related to Blackness and African-ness absorbed through the white imaginary. And considers the way this phenomenon distorts reality impacting how The Other is perceived. She compares it to the racial hostility that happens when someone is speaking in a rational, clear and precise way but the interlocutor cannot understand. She calls this racial contempt where people of colour's words are seen as “mumbojumbo”.

She posits that this distortion functions differently from epistemic credibility and violence, it acts more as an intellectual block, playing out as a distortion, an almost physical experience, where people are literally not heard, or what is heard is not heard as is, but as imagined.

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